


A Little Blue

by Scappodaqui



Series: Scraps [5]
Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor, Banter amongst doomed men, Boys in Boats, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Feels Himself, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Joins the Yacht Club, Bucky befriends misfits, Bucky goes swimming, Dream Sex, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gay Science Bros, Gen, Historical Accuracy, Imaginative Masturbation, Love Letters, M/M, Masturbation, Masturbation Interruptus, Puns & Word Play, Science Bros, Science Nerd Bucky Barnes, The Gay Army Yacht Club, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 10:41:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4957234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scappodaqui/pseuds/Scappodaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>They exit the Paramount Theater and it feels for a moment as if they are riding off into the sunset just as the actors do, leaving behind the brass and velvet gloom for the setting sun outside. The sunset over Brooklyn. It glints off buildings. It gilds storefronts in blinding yellow. It glances over alleyways and leaves them in warm dark shadow, and it touches hints of mica in the flagstone streets and sidewalks and makes them sparkle.</i><br/> <br/><i>They leave the technicolor world inside the theater and the real world stands out in sharp relief; the relief of freedom, of breath held and let out.</i></p><p>Bucky returns safely after a dangerous mission.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Blue

**Author's Note:**

> The letter Bucky reads in this story may be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4620798/chapters/10577019).  
> This may be my most-beta-d story. Many thanks to [linguamortua](http://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua), BrighteyedJill, [stripyjamjar](http://archiveofourown.org/users/stripyjamjar/pseuds/stripyjamjar), and [DirectorShellhead](https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_sanguinity/pseuds/DirectorShellhead) for looking at the first scene, and [hansbekhart](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hansbekhart/pseuds/hansbekhart) for going over the whole darn thing with her customary deft touch.

They exit the Paramount Theater and it feels for a moment as if they are riding off into the sunset just as the actors do, leaving behind the brass and velvet gloom for the setting sun outside. The sunset over Brooklyn. It glints off buildings. It gilds storefronts in blinding yellow. It glances over alleyways and leaves them in warm dark shadow, and it touches hints of mica in the flagstone streets and sidewalks and makes them sparkle.

They leave the technicolor world inside the theater and the real world stands out in sharp relief; the relief of freedom, of breath held and let out.

Then Bucky’s eyes adjust and the world looks gray again. Almost too gray, dim and washed-out after all that brilliance. But then he looks at Steve and Steve looks back and it’s not anymore. It’s--

They’re talking while they walk down the street, an uninterrupted burble of words from Bucky. He turns around and hitches himself over so he’s walking backwards, eyes still on Steve, who moves steadily with shoulders hunched against an invisible wind. He always moves like that. A lock of hair flops in one eye. His shirt collar has been a little loosened, and stained with ink from the casual touch of his thumb.

“The whole point of the Invisible Man is what any of us would do if we were,” Bucky is saying. He hears himself from far away.

“I would act the same,” Steve says.

“I don’t know,” Bucky says. “I think of the possibilities, that’s what I think of, like what I could do with it; I could sneak into the Plaza Hotel maybe. But I’m glad you’re not. Invisible. I’d want to see your face. Your big nose. But being invisible is strange. Wouldn’t you still be able to see the gunk and guts you got inside? Or is it more like camouflage, where you fade in with what’s behind you? You know something? If I was invisible--”

“We’d all know you were there anyway, ‘cause you wouldn’t shut up,” Steve says.

He has on that smile of his, the one he aims at Bucky when he’s yammering. It’s a smile half wiseass and half just wise.

So Bucky yaks and yaks and pretends like he’s not just filling the space between them with words because he wishes it weren’t there.

And then--

There’s an abrupt sound, a _bang_ behind him, a jeep backfiring.

Pigeons flutter up with the sound and texture of crumpled newspaper blown in his face.

There’s a whole flock of them somehow. Pouring out of the gutter, flapping around like newspaper blowing up in the wind. It’s all getting very loud. There are more sounds of cars backfiring.

He’s lost Steve for a second. One of them’s gone invisible. Maybe it’s him.

There are a lot of pigeons really. A lot of birds. He had better shoot one. But he doesn’t have his rifle. The jeep’s on its side, turned over. Crushed on one side like crumpled newspaper.

 _Go, go, go, get back, get down_.

No.

He’s fine, they’re fine.

Steve’s got him by the shirt collar and Bucky’s got his hands on Steve’s arms, shielding him with his body.

 _There’s just a second when he feels the hot-cold wash of blood down his forehead and he blinks and it’s gone_.

They’re up against the wall. Cold brick.

No; it’s a tree. Behind the mess tent. It’s dark enough that it’s hard to see, but what his eyes fix on is the luminosity of Steve’s, looking back at him. His gaze is level and defiant. His shoulders are hunched like he’s just come in from the Brooklyn wind: blown in with the newspapers.

Bucky says, “Steve? How’d you get here?”

Steve says, “The things you can do when you’re invisible, you were right.”

“No, _you_ were right,” Bucky says. “You’d do the same thing. Besides, you’re not invisible now. I see you.”

Steve says, “You always did.”

Steve says, “Have you ever really looked at your face in the mirror?”

Bucky says--says back, to the shadows under Steve’s eyes, to the blue of his eyes even in darkness, says--It doesn’t even make sense, but it does make sense. Bucky says, “I was too busy looking at yours.”

It strikes him that this is the most brilliant thing he has ever said in the world. It’s like he has won the game of everything. He gets the prize, the blue ribbon. He wins a ticket to the ice cream parlour. He gets to put his lips on Steve’s and they’re all warm liquid melting together. A sundae in the summer. The wetness sucks out of his cheeks. The whole world is the warm red inside of their mouths. He can see it. When he closes his eyes. He zooms in on the warm sucking red of their mouths.

Then back outside, a slow pan out. He watches himself, somehow, from behind. He sees himself kneel, in his army uniform, in front of Steve. One leg bent because he’s a little too tall. One hand braced on Steve’s leg. Steve’s pants are open, and his sharp hipbones jut out.

Bucky has seen Steve’s erection before, not up close, but there’ve been times… times waking up, or just out of the corner of his eye while _Bucky’s_ getting dressed and Steve’s sort of watching and they both know, but don’t say anything--

\--but somehow it’s exactly like he remembers. It’s right there, flushed, that’s it, just flushed with blood, dark pink, red at the tip like a goddamn cherry and a little slick like a lick of cream left on it. For some reason he knows he doesn’t have to say a thing, because he could look up and he’d see Steve with that face on, that face somewhere between intent and wanting to smile and not letting himself.

Because sometimes Steve is the only one who holds them together. When he sets his jaw and won’t quite let himself laugh off a dumb suggestion Bucky’s made.

When Bucky leaned in to kiss him and he didn’t flinch away.

When Bucky tells jokes and they’re all hope, really; they don’t feel real until--

His mouth is full of warmth, his hands are on those bony hips where veins run down, and there’s sticky skin and fingers hooked into belt loops and he’s making little noises in the back of his throat, hungry, wanting--

And Steve’s going, “Bucky. _Bucky_ ,” in that voice, that voice of his, the one he uses when he’s arguing, like he wants you to push back, and he says, “ _Bucky_ \--”

“--Barnes, shut the fuck _up_ yer moanin’,” says Dum Dum Dugan, and kicks Bucky in the leg.

Bucky comes awake gasping, like he’s coming up out of seawater or the sucking mud of the bottom of his foxhole when it’s rained. He comes awake gasping and painfully hard, and he’s somehow kicked off his thin blanket, and they’re safe. His heart slows its thrum. They’re safe.

He props himself up on his elbows, his bare stomach moving up and down like a tired dog’s. They’re safe in a tent. Not a pup tent. A real big one, back at base, with a cookstove and everything. All the amenities of home, practically. They’re safe. The jeep that blew up is far behind them. Lewish’s opened-up ribcage is only an afterimage he doesn’t have to think about. He thinks about Stevie’s ribs instead: their halting rise and fall, the way they slowly recede from view in the couple months a year when he stays healthy. The summer months, which these are, now.

He can see Dugan still awake.

He says, “Sorry.”

Dugan’s eyes go down to where Bucky’s tented up his shorts. “Jesus, Barnes, well, if you’re _up_ anyway,” he grumbles, flopping onto his back. He reaches out, grabs for bits of cotton wool from over where they’ve been using it to clean the rifles, and stuffs some in the ear closer to Bucky. Hopefully the bit he’s got is one of those not yet gunked up with oil and cordite. “Keep it quiet. I’m gonna get some more shuteye. Jee-sus.” He lays himself out flat with a grunt, and almost immediately his snores tickle at his mustache.

Bucky collapses onto his back again and sighs. It feels like he’s never alone.

He tries to slide himself back into the rich crevices of his dream. The cool air on his stomach where he’s kicked off his blanket wakes him up some; the waft of it tickles his prick where it’s standing up inside the looseness of his shorts. He thinks about Steve. He worms his hand down to hold himself. His left hand. He’s pretending it’s not his. He’s pretending the clumsy touch is Steve’s, his sensitive broad fingers holding him the way they hold a paintbrush.

Steve’s murmur: _hey, have I got the color right, Buck?_

 _A little more blue, Steve,_ Bucky often says, wickedly, ‘specially if Steve’s working on a nude. Sometimes he even leans just a little too close in over Steve, fingers hovering over the paper, which is damp if he’s doing a watercolor.

 _A little more blue, Stevie,_ he says in his head, sliding his finger in under Steve’s ink-stained collar, fumbling with shirt-buttons, carefully, like he’s unwrapping a present. Steve’s bony chest sticks out under it like he’s puffed up for a fight, but he’s not at all. It’s the fluttering beat of his heart coming out to rest against Bucky, and his hot pink skin, and--

Bucky tends to skip over details when he imagines this stuff, because it’s stupid doing things like having to get out of clothes. So they’re naked, and sort of bent over like that so he can see the crease of where Steve’s hip meets his drawn-up thigh, a ticklish place. He tucks his thumb in there and feels Steve’s stomach twitch. They’re just a jumble of limbs then and Steve’s breathing is strong and even and not at all hoarse, except where it catches in his throat on an inward sigh. Then he’s sliding down over Buck’s hips, straddling him, and they’re sorta rubbing together and then--then maybe his mouth? Yeah, Steve’s mouth, and his face set with that focused-down look like the first time Bucky watched him try to smoke, ‘cept he wound up with an asthma attack, they’d just been kids then, Jesus, so not like that but when--

No, he’s back up on top of Bucky and they’re all twined together, skin on skin is what it is, legs all curled over each other like the first time he tried fucking Maureen Adler. Toes rubbing along the arch of his foot. His own toes, Steve’s toes, whatever. Steve’s giving him instructions like when they try to fix their goddamn old stove.

He says, “No, like that, Bucky. Yeah. There.” And Bucky goes, “Yeah. Yeah, Steve,” and Steve goes, “That’s right.”

Bucky’s hand is moving and he feels Steve’s hand on him--well they’re both his hand, obviously, they have been all along--the touch tentative--both of them together feeling this. This pulsing movement, the buck of his hips. He screws his eyes shut and he sees _Steve_ and the slow rocking push upward of _his_ hips, that intent frown on his face and lip caught in his teeth and _fuck_ \--Bucky has bitten his lip, and his hips are grinding, his cock is hot and drumskin-tight and his feet twisting and he’s got his shorts down sliding over his thighs and then he comes, pulsing spunk all over his stomach.

He feels it tickle his belly button when he smears his hand upward through fine curling hair, which he imagines is Steve’s, and he imagines it’s Steve’s hand on him, gentle, tentative, following the trail of shiny slick stuff and damp hair up his hollow belly.

He thinks of Steve going, “Bucky, we’ve gotta feed you up,” and Bucky goes, “Yeah, all the sundaes we can eat, punk, what about _you_?”

“Yeah, punk… what about you?” he says in his head.

Steve’s hand, his hand, rests right over where he breathes up and down and up and down. He says, “That was good, Buck.”

“That was good, punk.”

He’s a fuckin’ mess. His breath is catching in his throat still. He’s gotta get himself cleaned up.

Bucky flings out his right hand and fumbles for something cloth. He finds it, folded neatly on top of his uniform: the square of blue parachute silk they’ve all been saving from their first successful landing. They wore it as a necktie at first, but on missions it wasn’t practical, so he stowed it away, first inside his shirt and then, when the idea struck, down his pants. Now he bunches up the crumpled silk and swipes it over his messy stomach. He starts to clean between the fingers of his left hand, but then he thinks better of it, and sticks his hand in his mouth instead. He tastes himself, pretending it’s Steve’s hand and Steve’s spunk: salty, mushroomy, mouth-puckering; almost but not exactly sweet.

Pretending it’s not him. Pretending it’s not here.

He tries to go back to sleep, but it’s not real sleep. He only sinks again into uneasy half-waking dreams.

* * *

 He wakes up again to the sight of Billie waving a hand in his face, and the smell of charring meat. For a second he’s disoriented once more, and then he remembers about the cookstove in their tent.

“We got a sheep,” Billie says. “I’m the king of the forest.”

“You are,” Bucky says, smiling sleepily at him. Billie looks a little sheepish himself, with a head of curly light brown hair and a round face and a look in his eyes like he’s always about to ask a question but has just forgotten what it was. At the moment he also has sutures just above one eye. “What happened to you?” he asks.

“I found some Coccinellidae,” Billie says, ducking the actual question.

“English!” says Dugan, from over by the stove. He’s the one cooking, so Bucky steels himself.

Billie holds out a folded over handkerchief and opens it up so Bucky can see. Inside is a crinkling pile of red-brown carapaces, as tiny and delicate as the red peppercorns that come in glass bottles back home. The kind Bucky’s ma puts in her stew. These are not peppercorns, though.

“Bugs?” Bucky says.

“No-o-o,” says Billie, shaking his head, fumbling through the little desiccated insect shells and pulling one out. He shows it to Bucky. “Beetles. Coloeptera. It’s different.”

“Oh, huh,” Bucky says, taking a closer look. The tent’s a little dim. “Ladybugs.”

“Yeah, I thought so,” Billie says. “But--”

“But they’re men bugs dressed funny?” Dugan tosses in.

Bucky glares at him, and Dugan shrugs, and says, “Hey, we had a bearded lady in the circus.”

Billie says, “No, they’re not ladybugs. The spots are the wrong color. They’re white, not black. I’m gonna send it home to my old teacher.”

Lou shambles by just in time to take his share of the meat. It turns out he’s helped prepare it, too, so it’s not at all bad. They’re all surprised Bucky didn’t wake up earlier when Dugan was pounding the tough mutton flat on a rock with a hammer. So it’s tender enough, if a little gritty. Lou has put pepper on it and lemon juice, from a real lemon tree he found near the olive grove where they’re staying. The acid has made the meat even softer.

The funny thing about wartime is that they take better care of their teeth than ever. The Army is fanatical about enforcing tooth-brushing twice daily, at morning and at night. Bucky appreciates the civilizing rhythm of it.

So he’s got a fresh mouth when he sits down on rocks outside with the rest of them to plates of mutton and real eggs. The eggs, Lou informs him, cost twenty-five cents each of real American money.

“I’ll pay you back,” Bucky says.

Lou says, “Consider it an IOU to be drawn from your ten thousand,” which is the pay their families will get if they die.

Dugan says, pointing at Lou with the tip of his knife, “You are such a shit.”

Lou clears his throat, and Dugan sighs and goes, “You are such a shit, _Corporal._ ”

“Oh, yeah?” Bucky says, delighted.

Lou ducks his head, and Billie pushes his shoulder. Lou’s smaller than Billie, a fine-boned Italian with ink-dark hair and almost-black eyes. He passed for a native in Tunisia. He almost falls off his rock, but he does manage to keep manful hold of his mutton.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lou says. “It’s what I get for keeping my nose clean. I guess this First Sergeant took a shine to me.”

Bucky is focusing on the pleasure of the first food he can remember really chewing after a week of canned C-rations. But he looks up at this. First Sergeant? There are a lot of First Sergeants. “Huh,” he says.

Lou goes on, “That, and, well, we lost a lot of guys, so I guess they needed another non-com. Maybe they were worried _you_ wouldn't make it back, Sarge.”

Billie says, “So, how did it go for you guys?” He’s talking about Bucky and Dugan’s mission. They were out for almost two weeks this time. Bucky wonders if Dugan told them about the overturned jeep they found. He doesn’t want to ask.

Dugan clears his throat and shakes his head, setting aside his plate. He eats fast, Dugan, like he’s brushing food quickly away with the broom of his mustache. He belches.

Bucky says, “Nine hundred yards _in the field_. The rest, you know how it goes.”

Dugan mimes zipping his lips, but is interrupted by another belch.

“That sheep doesn’t agree with you?” Lou says.

“Not like it had any say, once the 107th got their hands on it,” Dugan says.

Billie smiles. “Hey,” he says to Bucky, “There was a guy asking about you.”

Bucky jumps. The sheep’s fighting him now, too. “What?”

“Yeah, he’s an engineer? He was helping ‘em fix up the tanks.”

John isn’t a tank engineer, as far as Bucky can tell, but he knows that for the Engineering Corps, any job is really fair game. They work hard.

“Oh, great,” Bucky says. “I’ll stop by.”

“Watch out,” Dugan says, pointing his knife-tip at him. “You’ll get roped into helping them weld. Those tank men--”

Tank drivers and especially tank gunners don’t necessarily get along with snipers. Dugan, who drove a tank fighting the Japanese in Guadalcanal, is an exception. But generally, they are each other’s chief fear in the field--not that those on the same side are dangerous, but German snipers can pick a tank guy out when he has his head sticking from the turret. So it’s the idea of it. The tank troops had looked askance at Bucky when he’d stopped by last time. But these would be new guys he hadn’t met yet and he didn’t have to say what his last mission had been, unless Billie had been running his mouth.

“I don’t mind helping,” Bucky says.

“Those guys are all right,” Billie says. “My sister sent a pitcher to cheer up the soldiers and one of the guys hung it right up inside of his tank next to one of Greta Garbo.”

“A _pitcher_?” Lou says, not that he’s one to talk, with his Jersey accent even singing Italian opera.

“How old’s your sister?” Bucky says.

He sees Billie counting in his head, working it out from what he’s pretended his own age is. He says, “Seventeen.” Bucky interprets, based on his stories of his sister who is two years younger. She is fifteen, sixteen at the most.

Bucky shakes his head at him, and Billie says, “What? She don’t mind. She’s miles away.”

Dugan says, “Boy, you’re treading on thin ice.”

Billie says, “Sorry.”

Lou says, “He’s from New Hampshire. The ice there is all thick, like his skull.”

Bucky notes for the thousandth time that Lou makes terrible jokes. Bucky’s are better. He’s sure of it. So he’s careful not to laugh. “You won’t catch me giving out pictures of my sisters,” Bucky says. “Then again, my sisters aren’t dumb enough to send me pictures, except Lizzie’s drawings.”

“You sure come from an artistic background,” drawls Lou. “You, and your sister, and that fella always writing you, real dabblers.” Steve is not a dabbler. This is why everyone gets annoyed with Lou. “Speaking of, you missed mail call. More came this morning.”

He sits back, putting aside his plate, and casts an amused glance at Dugan. Clearly, he’s waiting to see Bucky’s expression change, which Bucky’s afraid it does. He knows it does, because the corners of his mouth lift up into a smile that swoops his stomach up with them.

“Okay, who’s got the letters?” he asks. “Who’s got ‘em?” He already has one from Steve--he got that yesterday, with his picture in it--but there could be more.

“Billie don’t,” says Billie Do, putting down his plate and holding up his hands: _don’t shoot_. Actually, none of them call him Billie Do anymore. He’s come into more of his own name lately. And they call Bucky just ‘Sarge,’ more often than not; the names for everyone have shifted a bit over time.

Bucky’s not sure he likes that, being called Sarge. There was a _dog_ he saw running around called Sarge. Plenty of guys are called Sarge. Sarge is a guy you go home and tell war stories to your folks about; it’s not Bucky, really. But he supposes ‘Bucky’ isn’t either, and at least it’s not as bad as ‘Dum Dum.’

“You,” Bucky says, staring down Lou. Lou blinks back at him, utterly calm. The thing is, Lou is an absolute freak for neatness, so it’s not like Bucky would have any trouble finding the letters in his tent. Lou keeps his fucking socks rolled up. He folds his underwear. He puts pictures up on little hooks he makes out of the dead wire from old radios and his spare shoelaces. He has a picture of the Santa Maria by his bedside, hanging from an innovative loop made out of his rosary beads, which means he has to take it down whenever he wants to pray. Lou picks fuckin' flowers and puts them in there, too, like there’s not already grass growing up through the floor.

And they say Bucky’s the artistic one. Well, he knows why they say that. Lou and Dugan say it, anyhow. They have an inkling. Back home he didn’t come off queer, he thought, but somehow here, stripped down to just himself and away from the guys he used to work with and his old casual gestures, he just gets read that way. Maybe it’s how he always has his hair brushed and even has Dugan cut it in the field, and likes to keep a clean shave, though other men are like that and no one thinks anything of it. Or maybe it’s how he talks about Steve. He doesn’t know.

“Yeah, so the mail came,” Lou says, drawing out the suspense on him. “Now, Billie, of course, has got some cookies from his mother. Hard as rocks. You could break a tooth. I said, gosh, I’m sorry they got ruined on the way. He goes, nah, that’s just how she makes ‘em at home.”

Billie says, “I did not say that.”

Lou goes on, having apparently become the unit cutup in Bucky’s absence, “Billie also has himself a nice stack of comics, but that wasn’t enough, because he had to trade a picture of his _sister_ to the tank crew for the latest Captain America--”

“It mentions the 107th,” Billie says, “I _had_ to. They have Captain America come in and help the 107th fight Hitler. I also got an extra egg out of the deal.” He sits up straighter on his rock, tugging at his collar: he’s proud of himself. He’s real patriotic, Billie is. So is apparently his whole family, including the sister. New Hampshire. He has the state motto scratched on his Zippo lighter: _Live Free or Die_. He has confided in Bucky the _real_ state motto, which is _Leave, Freeze, or Die._

“You know, my friend Steve helps with that comic,” Bucky says. He’ll borrow it from Billie later and try to see if he can figure out which lines Steve inked.

“We know,” says Dugan.

“You get mail?” Bucky says.

“Yeah, I got it off Lou earlier,” Dugan says. “Some of us were up early. Some of us didn’t tire ourselves out all night.”

“That’s not gonna get any better,” Lou says. “You got some hefty letters from that sweetheart,” he goes on, to Bucky, digging at him. “We’re all in for it now.”

Okay, so Bucky gets a little moony sometimes. It’s not like Dugan doesn’t have a damn locket with his wife’s face in it. He’s seen it. She looks like Mae West, blowsy and bold, like something out of a last-century portrait with her hair all curly around her face.

“You shouldda heard him last night,” Dugan says.

“Again?” Billie says, wide-eyed. “You’re gonna go blind.”

“That’s not how it works,” Bucky says. “C’mon, would I still be making nine-hundred yard shots if it worked like that? It’s healthy. It’s like cleaning out the pipes.”

“Pig farmers are doing that,” Billie says, a propos of nothing. “I know a fella, he says that they have to jerk off the hogs on account of them not taking a liking to the right sows. Then they use a baster.”

Bucky and Lou exchange a horrified, commiserating look. They’re city men. They don’t want to know this much about their bacon, the sheep they have just eaten aside.

Dum Dum says, “Our elephant cow in the circus used to get hot. Now that was a sight, her rubbin’ up against the center pole of the tent. Whole thing damn near came down on top of us.”

“I’m sure learning a lot in the Army,” Bucky says. “It’s broadening. Don’t you feel broadened?” he says to Lou.

“I’ve been so broadened I’ve gone flat,” Lou says. “If you turned me sideways I could slide through a crack in the wall.”

They get up and leave Dum Dum and Billie sitting on their rocks in the sun. The camp’s in an olive grove and there are lemon trees intermixed, and pear trees; those trees, at least, Bucky knows. There are fig trees around sometimes and Lou gets real excited about them, but to Bucky their fruit tastes like a mouthful of grit.

“I still wanna learn the kinds of trees,” he tells Lou, who walks him over to the tent like he’s afraid Bucky’s gonna go through his stuff if he doesn’t keep him company.

“That there’s a lemon tree,” Lou says, which is obvious because it has fucking lemons on it.

“Yeah, jackass,” Bucky says. “But what was the tree I was up down near Anzio, what was the name of that one? It had these real thick branches and bark that flaked off, and--”

Lou gives an exaggerated shrug with the shoulder closest Bucky. “ _Non lo so_ ,” he says.

“Stop the damn dago talk.”

“Say that round here and you’re really asking for it,” Lou says.

“But what kind was it?” Bucky asks.

“Well, you got lemons in your lemon tree,” Lou says, puzzling it out, “and pears in your pear tree, and I figure, a tree with you in it has to be a sniper tree.”

“There are a lot of those,” Bucky says glumly. Too many are German.

“All kinds a’ fruit around here,” Lou says, and they reach the tent, and he draws aside the flap and motions Bucky in.

Bucky says, “Fuck you, Lou,” once they’re inside. Lou’s name lends itself well to abuse, and he appreciates this, because the guy deserves it. _Fuck you, Lou; screw you, Lou; why so blue, Lou?_

He blinks to get his vision back. Lou leaves the tent flap rolled open and crouches to rummage under his thin flat pillow for Bucky’s letters. The pillow has a damn crocheted cover, gone rusty-colored around the edges by now. He carried it from when some Sicilian lady gave it to him there. He drags it out every time they come to a more permanent place.

Lou hands the letters to Bucky, who’s on one knee still staring at the pillow cover.

Bucky can’t resist; he looks at the addresses and the names right away. His thumbnail starts to sneak under the gummy flap of the first envelope. Steve’s letter is dated from before the latest, so he's read them out of order again. His parents have written him and Ruth has sent something separately, on her own. Her handwriting’s an angry scrawl across the front. He looks back up.

Lou’s watching him with his head tilted to one side. Bucky doesn’t know what to make of his expression, so he says, “Yeah?”

“Nothing,” Lou says. He clears his throat. He says, “Listen, Barnes. You’re good with letters. You’re not a dingus like Billie and Dugan.”

Dugan isn’t really a dingus; he just acts that way. Bucky shrugs.

“What I mean is, we oughtta write each other’s folks, if the other one of us bites it,” Lou says.

“Oh,” Bucky says. He realizes that, while he was gone, out of radio range and behind German lines with Dugan, there was a good chance Lou thought he might be dead. “Yeah, Lou. Sure. Your family.”

“My _nonna_ too,” Lou says. “She only speaks Brooklyn, so she better hear it from you.”

“Yeah, and my family,” Bucky says, “And Steve too.”

“Yeah,” Lou says, rolling his eyes. “Of course.”

“I’m serious,” Bucky says. “Tell my parents anything you want, tell ‘em I was doing something heroic, but tell Steve the truth about what happened, okay? If it happens, I mean.”

“Geez,” Lou says. “Okay. Well, just tell my family I--” He hesitates. “Just tell ‘em whatever you think,” he says finally. “Tell ‘em I was a good guy.”

“Boy, you better not kick it anytime soon, or you’ll make a liar of me.”

But Lou is a good guy. He’s a bit of a dingus himself--mean and sharp and dour--but he’s a good guy.

There’s a joke they heard, from one of the comedians in the USO show. Not Bob Hope. Bucky honestly can’t remember the name. It’s a joke about a man and a cat.

Actually it’s a pair of men, brothers.

The one brother goes on vacation and leaves his cat behind for the other brother to look after. Halfway through, he calls home and asks, ‘How’s the cat?’ And his brother says, ‘The cat’s dead.’ The brother goes, ‘You can’t just tell me my cat is dead! You gotta break it to me gently. First you tell me my cat is up a tree. Then you tell me my cat is sick. Then you tell me, oh, I’m so sorry, the cat’s dead.’

So the brother goes, ‘Okay.’

And the next time they talk, he starts, ‘Well, Ma is up a tree.’

Bucky has been up an awful lot of trees. But so far he’s always come back down.

He figures he’ll tell this joke the next time they have one of their little shows, and maybe this time Lou will laugh.

* * *

 He rereads Steve's letter from yesterday first. Steve’s in California, with the movie stars and stuff. California, a place where he says the water is dark and wild. He’s sent Bucky a picture of the mountains, and Bucky wishes like anything he could draw a picture to send back. Dugan says he knows a guy who’s got a Brownie Six-Twenty and would let him use it for a dollar, but Bucky isn’t sure the censors would let a picture of their location by. Or a picture of him, for that matter, not if he sends it to Steve. He could send it to his ma and ask her to pass it along, but he doesn’t want to do that to her.

So he just wanders out to the lake and sprawls there, looking at the shine of sun on water. A couple of guys have paddled out into the middle of it. They have rigged up a motorboat with a little raft and are diving off it. He hears their shouts from far away. Later he’ll go out himself; later, once he’s done reading his letters.

Ruthie’s okay. She’s not failing math anymore. In fact she has enclosed her latest test.

Bucky’s dad has written him about the Great War and how he still has friends from back then. Bucky knows he didn’t wind up seeing much action due to his job, which was clerical because he’d gone to college. He writes to Bucky how proud he is, and Bucky reads the obverse of that word: shame. Bucky’s ma has sent him Life Savers. Bucky stares at the chalky candies. Life Savers. Okay, he thinks. Okay. He presses a kiss to the paper before he starts writing her letter back: a letter to his ma, who still believes in the grace of a late-afternoon pick-me-up, of Life Savers, of a glass of milk in the kitchen, of Victory Gardens, of shifts taken at the Red Cross while the girls are at school.

He reads Steve’s letter twice, and the new one, but it’s the pictures he stares at longest. He only got to look at them in the dark of his tin-can-shaded lamp last night. The mountains in California are alien to him, and he realizes that some of the remove he feels comes from the perspective of the artist: Steve, looking at them, finds them alien too. Towering up over him. Stark and ragged, their rock peaks above lushly pencilled foliage. Like Tarzan’s escarpment in those Johnny Weissmuller flicks they used to watch.

Steve has also sent a self-portrait, finally. Bucky stares at his face, with its wry little smile.

You’d think you could see better in the bright sun but it’s not so. In fact it obscures the sketchy lines of the picture. It glares off the whiteness of paper like it’s trying to scour away the image on it, like it intends to spread its heat down until nothing is left but clean and empty white. Bucky moves into the shade of a tree--an olive tree, this he knows by its small pointed dark leaves that are pale green-gray and velvety on one side--and stares at it again. Now spots swarm in front of his eyes, and then finally the image comes to life. Steve stares back at him. It is an optical illusion, almost: his smile. It looks at first like it could be a frown, due to the lines above his eyebrows, but then you look closer and see it, the upward curve of the corner of his mouth, which looks like it’s growing even while Bucky watches, though that could be the flickering afterimage from the sun.

He brings the paper up to his face and breathes in the smell of it. Which is not much of a smell, really. But smelling almost nothing after weeks of his own ripeness and mud and smoke and blood: that is something, after all. He wants to press a kiss to this page too but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to mess it up. There’s a crease running through it already, cutting Steve’s nose in half. He’s drawn himself looking hard, sharp, and square-jawed, squinting a little, like he’s searching for something. Which he always is. He’s always looking ahead.

Bucky stows the letters carefully inside his rolled-up blanket back in his tent, and goes to find John, which is not difficult. John stands at least six feet, five inches tall. His head sticks up above the crowd of tank drivers and gunners who are adorning their vehicles with racks for spare canteens and anything else they’d like to bring along. Tank drivers are hermit crabs, and the tanks were not designed with enough space for what they’d like to take with them. Sparks stream out from their welding like fireworks, though they appear pale in the sun’s competing light.

When John sees Bucky, he gives a forceful wave. His whole body moves with his arm, like he’s made of rubber.

Bucky walks over and John salutes him. “You really don’t gotta,” Bucky says. “The Major isn’t a stickler here, he kind of lets us relax.” Bucky’s not even wearing his stripes; he’s down to his undershirt, and that’s damp under the arms. It’s broiling hot.

“Engineering Corps never relaxes, Sergeant,” John informs him.

“I can see that,” Bucky says, as the guy next to John is still holding a welder connected to a generator. “Tungsten!” John tells Bucky brightly.

“Nice to meetcha,” Bucky says.

John’s companion laughs. “No, I’m William,” he says, while the welder spits sparks. He turns the handle on the generator and they dissipate, and he sets it down. He shakes off his thick glove and takes Bucky’s hand. “This is a tungsten arc welder,” he says, patting it once they’ve let go; his hand is sweaty from its time inside the glove.

“Oh!” Bucky says.

“Don’t worry about it,” John says. “It’s very new.”

“Wow,” Bucky says. He looks down and then up again and squints a little against the sun. William’s a lot shorter than John, so he has to shift back and forth between them with little turns of his head. “So in case you were thinking I ought to go jump in a lake,” he says.

“Huh?” John says.

“I mean, if you’re busy. I think I’m going to actually go jump in the lake.”

“We’ll join you,” says William, pulling off his helmet. His hair sticks up, sweaty. “Definitely could use a dip.”

“No, I wanted to talk to you,” John says, “It’s just--yes, let’s, all right.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, “Okay, sure.”

The tank crew gives them amiable nods but it’s clear things are wrapping up. There is only so much adornment one can give to one of the Sherman tanks, what with them already having applique armor added on to shore up their too-thin plating. It’s not as bad as the M2A4s Dugan talks about scornfully from Guadalcanal, but it’s still not good enough. What’s good enough? Bucky wonders. Good enough and the Germans would come up with something else to throw at them.

John and William tell him all about how tungsten arc welders work on the way to the lake and Bucky gets chattier, too, and relaxes some. At the water’s edge, they pause to strip down. Bucky eyes John sideways, and John tips his chin at William and says, right out,

“Don’t worry, he’s not in my yacht club.”

William shrugs, kicking off his boots. Bucky goes, “Yacht club?”

“You know,” John says, “the one that friend of yours is in, the one whose back you watch.”

“Oh,” Bucky says.

William says, “Listen, makes no difference to me who’s in the yacht club, even if I’m not myself. I could still use a boat ride sometimes, know what I mean?”

Bucky tries to figure out what this means and then decides it means like the guys who sometimes get their dicks sucked near the Navy Yard. He says, “Oh.”

John says, “Don’t worry, I didn’t think you were--” He’s out of his shirt by now and down to his underwear. What surprises Bucky is that he doesn’t feel anything looking at him. He’s just a tall skinny guy, oddly put-together, with a sunken pigeon chest and--well, Mrs. Rosen would say, kindly, ‘He has a face.’ _Am I handsome? Well, you have a face._ It’s a way of saying someone isn’t well-favored without really saying it. Bucky supposes that just because he’s… what, a member of the yacht club? doesn’t mean he pays attention to any other guy who’s also a member. Basically he pays attention to Steve.

“I am,” Bucky says, surprising himself. He doesn’t take his own shirt off, yet, though. Just socks, pants. He stuffs his rolled-up socks in his boots. He says to William, “Don’t get any ideas, though.”

“Hey, there’s girls around here,” William says.

John goes, “Yeah, there were--”

“Shut up,” William says, and John raises an eyebrow at Bucky and shrugs.

Dang, it seems like John sure is making out here in the Army and if that’s what he wants, then fine, Bucky supposes that’s fine.

William goes off to find them a boat--he says he can start the motor of the broken-down one no one’s using. Bucky finally peels off his shirt and says, to John, “Okay, just so you know, though, just because we’re both in the--”

“It’s all right,” John says. “Though I sort of thought you and that fella you were with, the good-looking one with the dark hair…”

“No,” Bucky says. “What, Lou?” Good-looking? He laughs, but it tapers off. Huh. Lou is good-looking; he just never thought about it like that. He says, “No, Lou’s not...”

John rolls his eyes and says, “Right.”

Bucky says, “Oh, geez, no. I’ve--” He recalls what John said before. “I’ve got a fella.” It makes him absurdly pleased to say it, finally, the uncomfortable churn in his gut replaced with warmth. “He’s an artist. Back home. Or at least--well, he works in Hollywood now.”

“Hollywood,” John says. Bucky can’t make out his tone. Maybe big-time engineers think Hollywood’s silly. Steve sure does, but Bucky thinks it’s amazing.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Anyway. Lou isn’t in the yacht club. I don’t think.”

John says, “Just as well, then, because I think Sergeant Douglas took a shine to your Lou. I hope he took the turn-down all right. That’s what I wanted to tell you about; I saw them talking.”

“Oh, geez,” Bucky says again. It’s got to be the First Sergeant, the one he saw with John the other night, the big man. Trying to strike something up with Lou? Imagining the skeptical look on his face almost makes Bucky laugh, but then he thinks back to Lou’s promotion and wonders.

“Better if he can avoid that,” John says, with a touch of bitterness. “Douglas is no good.”

“I got that impression,” Bucky agrees.

So they’re both standing there. Both members of the yacht club, on a steep little beach near this lake. They’re both bare-chested and bare-legged, and John looks at Bucky maybe a second too long, and then William splashes up to them dragging a boat on a cable. Bucky’s relieved.

It’s a puzzling world. He’s been so broadened he’s gone a little flat himself.

* * *

 The remarkable thing is the water makes him feel entirely new again.

Bucky’s ma once told him how he always loved baths. Some babies cried, but he didn’t. He almost never cried as a baby; he was always smiling. Anyway, his ma always said, when she took him to Coney Island, he barely needed to hang on to ropes they tied to poles to keep them safe wading. He learned to swim right away. He could float through anything. It’s comforting maybe because it’s like before you were born, his ma told him.

Before you are born, when you breathe saltwater.

After you die, when you choke on the air with lungs burbling and broken open; you choke on air and blood. Then your breathing just ebbs away.

And he thinks that, under the surface of the water with sun shining through, and he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t mind.

He’s underwater. The water’s not blue. It’s greenish, like flawed glass.

Bubbles spiral up from the bottom.

The water tastes like mud and silt; it tastes old. It tastes primordial. It tastes like the beginnings and the ends of things.

It's dark and murky at the bottom, so he twists himself around through a somersault, bubbles coming now out of his nose and pressure in his ears, and blinks up through gritty water up at the sky, and then he breaks the surface.

“You were under for more than a minute!” John calls, because of course John would have an accurate clock right there in his brain. He’s bobbing around himself all awkward as Bucky’d expected, barely treading water.

William’s doing better. He splashes at Bucky, and Bucky splashes back, and he remembers going to Coney Island and kicking up water at Steve, getting their pant legs wet. He remembers the salt smoke smell, the seagulls. He remembers Steve’s sunburned nose and he wants so bad to shut his eyes and find himself at home and kiss the tender tip of it. He opens his eyes and spits water and wipes it away, and he splashes William back.

John says, “Hey,” and aims a splash his way too, and Bucky retaliates. They wallow for a while on the surface and then he just lets himself float, spread-eagle in the water with the sun coming down on him. Trees sigh in the distance.

He’s weightless. He’s thoughtless. His mind lifts itself and bobs free and pure inside the rustling carapace of his body.

After some time, when the sun has begun to set and the warm air has taken on an underlying chill--after the surface of the water reflects back not heat but coolness--they pull themselves back up on the boat.

They sit there with legs dangling over the edge. It’s a humorous picture, because John’s legs are so much longer than Bucky’s and William’s that he is in the water up to his shins and their toes barely dip in. The boat lists to the side they’re on, but they stay together; no one wants to move to balance it out.

Life Savers, Bucky thinks. They’re out in his pants pocket, back on the shore. He’ll get them later.

Bucky says, “This is a good day.”

John says, “Yeah.”

Bucky says, “It’s all ups and downs. I think that sometimes.”

The sun hovers somewhere near the horizon, near the distant hills. They’re gentler than the mountains in California, in Steve’s picture. They’re rolling little slopes. Far away, he hears the buzz of planes, and there is smoke--always smoke--from bombs; there is also, he sees, a spray high up of the tracer a plane has set off to warn the other fighter planes following it to stay off its tail. They are bombing the German stockpiles somewhere. He guesses it is already dim enough that they need the tracers. His stomach grumbles a little. The mutton was a long time ago. But he doesn’t want to go back in, even for dinner.

The boat rocks. Up and down.

“Like a sinesoidal wave,” John says.

William says, “Oh, be fair to the guy.”

Bucky says, “No, I knew that one; I know trigonometry.”

He thinks of it: the sine curve. Ups and downs snaking their way across the zero line of a graph. He says, “Yeah, we go down but then we just pop right back up, like you pop back when you’re under water. Irrepressible,” he says.

William turns and squints at him, and John moves so he just touches Bucky’s arm with his. It’s not a romantic touch, Bucky thinks. But it’s warm.

“Keep talking,” John says, and God. Bucky thinks of Steve.

He thinks how many times they do pop back up, but it’s also a movement that gets shallower every time. The peaks get lower and the lows feel more regular, and eventually it all turns into a flat line, bottoms out, and you’re done. He thinks of Steve, who always pops back up after a knockout punch--from some bully he’s antagonized or from some sickness that’s gotten in his chest. He thinks about ups and downs. He thinks about time spent under the surface.

Bucky says, “I can’t right now.”

They’re quiet for a bit. Then William says, “We better bring her in,” talking about the boat.

John says, “Sure,” and immediately almost upends them getting his legs inside. He thumps down on the wooden seat and scrambles back to work the boat engine.

“Thanks,” Bucky says, when they grind to a halt against the shore. He hops out and helps them pull the boat up. It’s getting toward evening now and his skin’s a little cold. He feels the darkness in the air, like it has weight. Cold air does weigh more. It's denser. That’s science. He looks up and John is frowning. Bucky turns around, because he’s looking at something over his shoulder. There: it’s the big man, the First Sergeant he saw the other night. Behind the mess. So long ago now, almost a month. Bucky drops the boat and salutes.

The big man says, “Barnes, is it?”

Someone told him; Bucky’s not sure who. He just nods.

First Sergeant Douglas ignores John and ignores William, and says to Bucky, “All right, then, as you were.”

So he helps pull the boat up to the shore. They find their clothes and pick them up, not caring to get dressed until the clean wet grass scrubs the last of the lake mud from their feet; or at least that’s Bucky’s reason. He figures John just wants to get away from Douglas, who is now looking out over the water, standing with legs planted in an habitual at-ease posture.

“Can we kick him out of the yacht club?” Bucky ventures, once they’re well out of earshot.

John makes a low sound in his throat. There’s a story there, and Bucky doesn’t know the half of it. “If we just started kicking people out, soon there'd be hardly anyone in it at all,” he says. “You can’t be too selective.”

“Well,” William says, standing a bit off from them, “I’m out for the night. See you later, Johnny.”

“Sure,” John says.

When William’s gone and they’ve gotten back into their clothes, John says to Bucky, “I hope I didn’t cause trouble for you, too, now. I really--you can see, I appreciate your watching my back. I wish I could return the favor.”

“You do, with the smoke cover,” Bucky says.

John shrugs. “They’re talking about reassigning me,” he says.

Bucky breathes in and out. He says, “Hope it’s to somewhere further from the fighting.”

“It is, actually. They don’t--well, they don’t need smoke screens as the battle lines advance. They need them where we have our weapons stockpiles, and over the bridges. The supply line.”

Of course, it makes sense. That’s what the Germans want to wipe out, after all.

“I’ll miss you,” Bucky says, which is idiotic, because they have barely met. It’s true, though. “Take care of yourself,” he says.

“I will,” John says. “And you, too.”

They shake hands. It’s only the third time they’ve even touched each other.

“I’d ask if this were the secret yacht club handshake,” Bucky says, “But I have a feeling--”

John laughs. “You’re quite a guy, Sergeant,” he says.

“Bucky,” Bucky says.

“Okay, Bucky.”

John walks off into the growing darkness, and Bucky watches as the sky seems to lower like a curtain over the distant hills.


End file.
